With Harold O’Neal releasing his first solo record on Damon Dash’s Bluroc Records and preparing for his album release show at Ginny’s Supper Club this Saturday 8/31/13. The record features Joe Sanders, Marcus Strickland, and Marcus Gilmore while the album release show will feature an equally impressive lineup of Jaleel Shaw, Ben Williams, and Kim Thompson.

The historic Newport Jazz Festival announced some very exciting additional acts for what is sure to be another great year for the festival. Featuring Wayne Shorter’s 80th Birthday Celebration: Wayne Shorter Quartet with special guests Herbie Hancock ,Danilo Perez, John Patitucci, & Brian Blade; for starters makes this a must-attend event.

Need some amazing music to smooth over the stress and trauma of the past week? You’re in luck! This week the Blue Note Jazz Club is hosting three nights (each with two sets) of a supergroup led by the incredible Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke featuring Ravi Coltrane on sax, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Chalres Altura on guitar.

By the 1940s Charlie Parker had already long established himself in the small group setting, yet he was still searching for new concepts and settings in which to package his music for audiences. “I was looking for new ways to say thing musically. New sound combinations,” Parker explained. Record producer Norman Granz sought to bring Parker into these new settings by way of touring, recording, and pairing him with the best musicians on the scene. As such, when the idea spawned for Bird to be paired with some of the most accomplished string players in New York, Parker fully embraced the notion, going around town telling people about his new band with “the cats from Koussevitsky’s band,” referring to Serge Koussevitsky who ran the New York Philharmonic at the time.

If The Revive Big Band is a “19-piece jazz army” (Complex Magazine), then what is their fight? Formed in 2010, the Big Band began as a “wouldn’t it be cool if…” kind of idea, where composer, arranger and trumpeter Igmar Thomas wanted to unite generations of like-minded musicians in presenting a new age of big bands. The project has grown to become one of the most exciting and imaginative bands – big or otherwise – in New York.

Vijay Iyer’s Accelerando highlights a certain something that our close-knit community has known for quite a while. Iyer’s virtuosic sense of groove defies the confines of genre or arrangement. He simply brings it. Whether that be in his string arrangements, collegiate dissertations on cognition and music, or here in one of his numerous trio formats, Iyer possesses the unique ability to impress your taste while appealing to your senses with his unpretentiously energizing passages. With the equally talented Marcus Gilmore on drums and Stephan Crump holding down the low-end this trio can’t get a whole lot better if it wanted to.

Launched in 2004 by jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, the Greenleaf imprint has been releasing music since 2004. The latest installment delivers three volumes of new music, composed and arranged by Douglas and performed with Douglas’s Brass Ecstasy, a quintet featuring Ravi Coltrane, Vijay Iyer, Linda Oh and Marcus Gilmore, as well as So Percussion, a new music ensemble.

The Jazz Gallery, one of our favorite jazz venues in the city to see music in a unpretentious environment where music and artistic expression come first, is launching The Woodshed at The Jazz Gallery. The Woodshed is a new initiative to offer musicians the use of the Jazz Gallery space at no charge for rehearsals. Starting in 2012, the Jazz Gallery will be available during “dark” hours to artists for about 15 hours per week, resulting in over 750 hours of free rehearsal time for NYC musicians in 2010.

To launch these efforts, the Jazz Gallery has gathered together a gang of the best musicians in town – Marcus Gilmore, Robert Glasper, Mike Moreno, Becca Stevens, Miguel Zenon, Jaleel Shaw, Marcus Strickland and many more – to launch a Kickstarter to set the program into motion.